


On the Line

by saltstreets



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Hijinks & Shenanigans, I've been sad about Iker Casillas for too long and IT ENDS TONIGHT, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4154775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sergio smiles weakly even as his just-settled brain starts screeching with code red fire alarms again. Iker isn’t talking about the national team anymore; he’s started talking about Madrid. This calls for some sort of drastic action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Line

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what this is or what the point of it is but I thought up half of it while lying on a hammock trying to drink a g&t without sitting up and the other half while in the shower so that's kinda all you need to know about the content you're about to read.

 

 

On the last night of international break after the Belarus qualifier the team goes out. They start, at Isco’s insistence, at a flashy discotheque-type place that features the somewhat unfortunate combination of loud electronica dance music and interludes during which an ancient karaoke machine is powered up on the stage. After the third overly-enthusiastic and overly-intoxicated rendition of _Ai Se Eu Te Pego_ Iker makes an executive decision and drags them all out to a slightly more low-key bar across the street, where they settle in for a few hours of drinking and chatting without the features of blinding neon flashing lights, or anyone wearing body glitter.

Sergio hadn’t minded the first place and had in fact been winding up to sing a duet with Piqué when Iker had reached the end of his karaoke tolerance so he was feeling a bit disgruntled, but nonetheless chatting with David Silva at the bar while perched on a stool and resigning himself to a somewhat quieter evening. He’s about to get another drink when a pair of arms loop themselves over his shoulders and a chin rests itself at the joint of his neck. He looks down and sees Iker grinning up at him, warm chest pressed against his back.

“Iker.” Sergio says, pleased that Iker seems to be letting himself relax, and that the win earlier was sending him down the ‘happy drunk’ footpath rather than into the ‘morose and self-aggrandising drunk’ alleyway that had been becoming his second home recently. The thirty-or-so decibel difference between here and the disco probably had something to do with it as well.

“Hi,” Iker says back and clasps his hands over Sergio’s chest. “What’s going on?”

“You’re drunk,” Sergio observes lightly, and Iker rolls his eyes.

“ _Ob_ viously.” he says, as if Sergio had asked a stupid question. “I’m in a nice, _quiet_ bar and I have nothing to do tomorrow but somehow find my way to the airport and then sit on a plane for five-odd hours. Not play a match or talk to people with cameras or anything. Actually, I won’t have to talk to anyone if I don’t want to, regardless of camera-status.” He ponders the concept approvingly. “Why wouldn’t I be drunk?”

Sergio laughs. “I’m just glad you’re enjoying yourself, that’s all. I like it when you can relax.”

“Shockingly, I like it too.” Iker says, but his tone is teasing as opposed to dour. He seems to notice Silva for the first time and smiles brightly at him, reaching out a hand to ruffle his hair. He can’t quite make the distance from over Sergio’s shoulder so Sergio obliges to lean forward almost doubled on his barstool so Iker can stretch across to his target. “Our goal scorer!” Iker says cheerily. “I’m so proud.”

“Thanks,” Silva says, dutifully allowing his hair to be mussed while holding back a snicker at Sergio’s expression where he finds himself squashed under Iker.

There’s a sudden crash from the other end of the bar and they all turn to see Isco on the ground surrounded by three toppled stools. Juan is fluttering over him, waving his hands in agitation. “I told you not to stack them! I told you!” He’s shouting, equal parts scolding and concerned. “You’ve gone and concussed yourself!”

Isco looks somewhat dazed but indignant. “I wanted to show you how tall I could be!”

The statement seems to make perfect sense to Isco but causes Alvaro, sitting on the table next to the disaster area, to lose it completely and nearly fall over as well with his cackling.

Sergio tries to suppress his own laughter.

“Maybe I should...” Iker says doubtfully, beginning to unsteadily unhook himself from around Sergio but Silva interrupts. “No offence Capi, but what you should do is sit down.” He grins. “You look like you’re about to topple over as well. I can go and make sure Isco hasn’t cracked his skull open.” He winks at Sergio. “Leave you two crazy kids alone.”

Sergio sticks out his tongue at Silva’s waggling eyebrows and opens his mouth to say something about being Isco’s actual club teammate and therefore far more qualified to go check on him when there’s another crash- Alvaro has indeed managed to laugh himself into unbalancing from the table and onto the floor, and Sergio decides that he would actually rather let Silva deal with it after all.

He and Iker watch the situation pan out, with Alvaro accidentally kicking Isco in the shin while trying to stand up and Piqué filming the whole thing with his phone, meaning that the footage will likely be heavily featured in the team e-mail mailing list for the next three to six months, if not longer. There’s still a blurry photo of Iniesta asleep under a table with a hollowed out loaf of bread on his head from 2010 that resurfaces occasionally, along with an ongoing collection of black-and-white pictures taken by Pepe stretching back to 2007 that he calls his ‘Xabi being problematic’ series. The mailing list is a heavily abused resource.

“You know, I’m going to miss this.” Iker says almost dreamily, still hanging over Sergio’s shoulder.

Sergio frowns and looks down sideways at him. “Miss this? Miss what?”

Iker unclasps one of his hands from across Sergio’s chest and makes a sweeping gesture in the general direction of the chaos. “All this. The team. _La Roja._ They’re a nightmare at times but at the end of it all-”

Sergio shrugs Iker off his back in order to spin around on the stool to face him. Iker lets himself be shifted and leans against the bar instead with only minimal swaying. “What are you-” Sergio starts and then begins again. “Iker, you’re not _retiring_ , are you?” He tries to keep his voice level and mostly succeeds.

“We all have to retire at some point,” Iker says patiently, as if he’s the sober one and it’s Sergio who’s practically clinging to the bar in order to remain upright and producing alarming statements out of nowhere. “It’s kind of part of the whole deal.”

“Well I’m not talking about ‘some point’, and it doesn’t sound like you are either!” Sergio accuses. “I’m talking about _now_ , are you retiring _now_?”

“No, I’m not retiring now.” Iker rolls his eyes. He shrugs. “But it’s just a thing to consider. I was just talking to Xavi the other day before the call-up and he was saying how he’s been missing the internationals and seeing everyone. So I was thinking about it. Retiring. I mean, from La Selección.”

The last qualifier is slightly tacked on and Iker might be holding on to the bar but he’s also fidgeting slightly in the way he does when he’s made a slip of the tongue and is hoping no one has noticed. Sergio narrows his eyes.

But Iker’s too drunk and Sergio’s not drunk enough for them to have the conversation that’s brewing like a storm just out of sight on the horizon, so he lets Iker get away with it. For now.

Seeing as his captain is somewhat impaired at the moment, Sergio takes it upon himself to gather everyone up and shepherd them into taxis once the clock ticks over to 2 AM and the bartender starts making meaningful glances at the door. With Spain’s finest safely on their way, Sergio bundles Iker into the final cab and crawls in after him, giving the driver the name of the hotel. He’s sobered up from his half-conversation with Iker and the task of wrangling teammates and so the dark interior of the cab is good for his buzzing mind.

Iker puts a hand on his knee and smiles lazily. “Thanks for taking care of everyone, nene.” He leans over to knock his forehead gently against Sergio’s shoulder. “You’re going to be a really good captain.”

Sergio smiles weakly even as his just-settled brain starts screeching with code red fire alarms again. Iker isn’t talking about the national team anymore; he’s started talking about Madrid. This calls for some sort of drastic action.

The cab reaches its destination and Sergio manages to coax Iker up to their room and then forces him to half-heartedly brush his teeth (“You’ll thank me in the morning, I swear to god just brush your fucking teeth! What are you, eight?”) before letting him collapse onto his bed. He takes a minute to grin as Iker crawls under the blankets and immediately drops off into sleep. He’d forgotten how ridiculous Iker could be when he was completely trashed. The past few months hadn’t really leant themselves to happy drinking.

He slips out of the room and into the hallway, blinking against the harsh hotel lights as he makes his way to the elevators. Sergio punches in a random number and then hits the stop button midway between floors. Then assured of a space where he can talk loudly at 2 AM without being disturbed (or, well, without disturbing others, but the most important thing was that no one would be able to get to him in order to shut him up) Sergio takes out his phone, finds the appropriate number in his contacts, and dials.

The line picks up on the fifth ring, which isn’t bad for 2 AM.

Sergio doesn’t bother with greetings, figuring that his name flashing on a phone at this hour would be warning enough for what’s coming.

“Stop talking to Iker about retirement,” he snaps into the phone, still just the right side of drunk and panicked to have lost his tolerance for pleasantries. “He’s getting ideas that I don’t need him to be getting, got it?”

There’s a pause. “...what?” says Xavi’s voice, bleary on the other end.

“You heard me! No more retirement talk! I know it’s all you senior citizens can think about but still!”

“I’m sorry, but _who_ is this?”

“Stop trying to change the subject, Hernández!” Sergio half-shouts. “All I need is-”

“No, seriously,” Xavi interrupts him, voice becoming less sleepy and more I-don’t-have-time-for-this-bullshit. “Who is this.”

He sounds genuinely unaware. Sergio takes his voice down a notch. “It’s Sergio Ramos. Obviously. What, do you not look at your phone to see who’s calling before picking it up?”

“Ah,” Xavi says in a tone of enlightenment. “I get it now. And no, I don’t actually have caller ID, so.”

Sergio gapes. “What? Who doesn’t have caller ID!?”

He can practically hear the shrug in Xavi’s voice, and can pretty clearly picture the disinterested expression on his face. “I don’t. Not on my landline, anyway.”

“Your- what the hell, man, who gives out their _landline_ anymore?” Sergio pulls the phone away from his ear to double-check, and sure enough he’d just called the number labelled ‘Xavi’.

“Oh, I always put my landline _and_ my mobile numbers into phones when people hand me them,” Xavi says cheerfully, as if he isn’t exhibiting any kind of abnormal behaviour whatsoever. He seems to be enjoying Sergio’s dismay at the admission. “Your phone must have just defaulted to the first number listed under my name when you called.”

“That is so completely weird,” Sergio informs him. “Christ, you’re not fifty years old, a _landline?_ _Seriously?_ ” He ignores Xavi muttering _what happened to being a senior citizen_ and barrels on. “What are they feeding you people up there at Barcelona, huh?”

“Well,” Xavi says wryly, “They aren’t feeding _me_ anything anymore, or isn’t that what you called to shout at me about?”

Oh, right. Sergio recalls the purpose of the communication. “Um, yeah.” He clears his throat. “Look, I know you and Iker talk a lot but can you- can you _not_ , look, I know you two were talking about La Selección and whatever strange nostalgia you already have for associating with a pack of people who when not playing football are drunk either in elation or shame and okay, sure, that’s fine. But I also know you were talking to him about leaving Barcelona.” Xavi makes a noise and Sergio cuts him off, “Don’t deny it, he didn’t exactly _say_ it in so many words but. You said something, and I just- could you maybe not? Anymore? Iker’s been, well, kinda down lately ‘cause of all the shitty press and these fucking rumours every single day ragging on him, when is he gonna go, when is he gonna get out, et cetera et cetera and really the last thing I need for him to hear is you talking about going to Qatar and the end of what’s really for all intents and purposes your club career, waxing poetic about the lack of pressure and how nice the sunset is going to be in the desert or what-the-fuck-ever, and he gets it into his head to waltz off to some lucrative footballing old age home like you are and- fuck, _fuck,_ the MLS! That’s a thing! Maybe I should call Raúl, too, how often does Iker talk to Raúl?”

He stops, remembering that the MLS did in fact exist in the real world and that while Iker in Qatar was a terrible concept, Iker in _America,_ with the Atlantic Ocean and possibly the entire North American continent between them, was even worse.

Xavi snorts, reminding Sergio that he’s actually talking to someone and not just ranting into the void of the elevator. “Your little mission to keep Iker away from anything having to do with changing clubs asides, no _shit_ he’s been feeling down lately, stuck in that nest of snakes you call a city with the journos snapping at his heels and the stadium baying for his blood every time he so much as looks the wrong way. A change of scene might even do him some good.”

Sergio feels a protest in defence of his city rising in the back of his throat –so the press was shit but Madrid wasn’t a _nest of snakes_ , Christ, and not _all_ the fans were awful, c’mon be fair- but arguing with Xavi’s assessment only seemed counterproductive to the point he was trying to make about Iker not needing any more incentive to cut and run at the first decent opening so he keeps quiet.

(He doesn’t even need to address the last part of Xavi’s attack because Xavi knows just as well as he does that leaving Madrid at this point would hurt Iker more than it would help him. Sergio knows that Xavi knows this because Sergio can only try to imagine what leaving Barcelona after a lifetime must feel like, and Xavi had gone out with a treble and bang rather than the empty handed whimper that Iker’s facing.)

There’s a pause during which Sergio senses Xavi’s eyebrows climbing up his forehead.

“What- no furious dissent? No nasty retorts? Not even a personal attack?” Sergio remains quiet. “O-kay, you’re actually worried. ...and now you’re worrying me. Sergio. Say something.”

“Of course I’m actually worried!” Sergio bursts out, angrily breaking his silence. He groans in exasperation. “Iker’s my captain and I can’t have him giving up the ghost and leaving m- us. Leaving _us_ just because of some spiteful journalists and a handful of shitty disgruntled fans! He hasn’t been allowed to make any mistakes and it’s _rattled_ him real bad, Xavi, it’s rattled him and then he makes more mistakes and it’s a fucking, a, a, whatdoyoucallit, a sort of-”

“Vicious circle?”

“Yeah, it’s a vicious circle and Iker’s been stuck in it for months and I hate seeing him like this and it just really fucking _sucks_.”

He takes a deep breath and drags his tone back from the near-hysterical edge it had been toeing up to.  “Iker’s too good for this and he doesn’t deserve any of it. You _know_ he doesn’t deserve it. You left Barcelona at a time that you chose. You walked out with confetti and fanfare and if Iker leaves Madrid it’ll because he’s been forced to walk the plank. That’ll kill him, Xavi. You know that’ll kill him.”

“It’s okay, I know. I do know.” Xavi says, in a kind tone which sort of makes Sergio embarrassed about the fact that he probably sounds like he’s about to start crying, but also sort of makes him want to _actually_ cry. “Don’t worry Ramos, I hear you. No going on about how playing for oil sheiks in a city where no one’s going to riot if you don’t win everything they throw at you is such a calming change.” He laughs. “Heard and understood.”

Sergio sighs, relieved. “Thanks.”

“But Sergio,” Xavi continues, conversational but with a sudden slightly contrived edge to his tone, “You do realise that if Iker leaves Madrid you would get the armband. On a permanent basis. If he stays in a more benched role you’d be stuck in vice-captain limbo similar to how Andrés was with me last season.”

Sergio blinks, surprised. He hadn’t even been taking his own status on the team into consideration. “Yeah, I mean...that’s _true_ but it isn’t really relevant to what Iker needs, y’know?” He protests, wondering why Xavi would bring this up. “I don’t- I mean, it’s not about captaincy it’s kinda about making sure Iker doesn’t actually wreck himself so-” He stops when he hears Xavi laugh quietly on the other end.

“Okay Ramos, I understand. That’s fine.”

Sergio narrows his eyes, suddenly getting it. “Hey, hang on a sec, was that- was that some kind of test!? Was that some kind of sly little Iker loyalty test!? You were seeing, what- if you could try and _corrupt_ me or some shit!?”

Xavi is definitely laughing now. “Hey, hey c’mon, I was only making sure. It is Real Madrid we’re talking about. I don’t know what kind of twisted politics you lot play around with.”

“Oh my god, fuck you Hernández!” Sergio shouts, but there’s no real venom behind it and he’s mostly yelling because he can and he wants to. “Like I would weirdly sell out Iker for an armband, gimme a fuckin’ break! We are actually a _team_ , y’know! This is why no one likes Catalans; you always have ulterior motives!”

“Ah, there’s the personal attack I was looking for earlier.” Xavi says gaily. “It was nice talking to you, Sergio, please feel free to call me at any time, on _either_ of my numbers! Good night!”

“You’re such a problem!” Sergio yells into the receiver but the line has already clicked and Xavi is gone.

Sergio fumes in the elevator for a minute at the _audacity,_ at the very _thought_ that Xavi might have doubted that his loyalty to Iker was less than rock fucking solid and that his intentions might be anything less than spotlessly pure and yeah, okay, so that kind of made it sound like he had been asking Xavi for Iker’s hand in marriage which was just...alright, a lot going on there but still. The sentiment held true.

But at least Xavi had understood where he was coming from. Sergio knew that he could be a little obscure at times when trying to convey his opinions on an issue, especially when said issue was so important to him that he _felt_ it more than he thought it.

And it had been cathartic in a way to be able to voice his worries like that. He couldn’t very well talk to any of his Madrid teammates about it: they were the first line of people who needed to see Iker as an unstoppable force, an immovable object. The keeper, the captain. And while it was obvious to anyone with basic sensory perception that Iker was going through a rough patch, the vice-captain admitting to concern that was keeping him up at night wouldn’t help much. Never mind the supporters whistling in the Bernabeu, if Real Madrid itself didn’t believe in San Iker, there was no way Iker Casillas would either.

And Xavi was now a pleasantly neutral party in the whole affair, maybe even a bit less than neutral due to his invested stake in Iker’s well-being. And hopefully once-a-culé-always-a-culé didn’t extend to calling Iniesta to tell him that if he wanted to make Sergio Ramos cry during the next Clásico all he had to do was whisper something like ‘Casillas to LA Galaxy confirmed’ in his ear. And to maybe punch him in the kidneys for insulting the Catalan character.

Sergio finally unstops the elevator and lets it continue up to the next floor before he can go back down. He becomes suddenly aware of the time and the beginning of a headache now that he’s sobered up and heading into what would be called early morning rather than late night. It’s a relief when he finally steps out from under the awful bright lights and into the blessed dark of his hotel room.

He’s stripping down to his boxers when he hears a stirring from the other bed and Iker mumbling his name questioningly.

“Hi, I’m here.” Sergio whispers back, going over and leaning against the mattress. “What’s up?”

“Why’re you still awake,” Iker says, trying to sound reproachful but still only partially conscious. “Go t’bed. Plane to catch in the morning.”

Sergio grins at him even though Iker hasn’t bothered to open his eyes and can’t see him. He’s pretty sure Iker has become attune to _hearing_ his grin, in any case. “Yeah, but I know you’ll be up on time and make sure that I am, too.”

“How’d you know I’ll be up on time? I might oversleep.” Iker says, drowsily retorting for the sake of being contrary. Even mostly asleep he can’t help arguing with Sergio.

“You’re the captain.” Sergio tells him, simply.

Iker concedes the point. “Okay, I’ll be up on time. Because I’m the captain and it’s my job to make sure all you idiots are where you need to be.” He yawns.

“And you’re the best at it, Iker.” Sergio leans down and plants an affectionate kiss on his forehead.

“Go to _sleep,_ Sese.” Iker says, curling deeper under his covers but Sergio can see him smiling. “Good _night._ ”

“Sure sure, good night captain.”

**Author's Note:**

> one day I'll write a fic that can't be described as 'so-and-so pairing but could be read as gen if you want'. Some day. But not today apparently.
> 
> (it's all about BETWEEN THE LINES, guys, cmon)


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